After an eight-year run on TV’s ‘House,’ actor Robert Sean Leonard returns to the stage with the Old Globe’s ‘Pygmalion’

“So I didn’t like the experience of playing the role. But I thought it was a good production.”

Youthful passion

Like a lot of accomplished stage actors, Leonard started very young; unlike many, he jumped almost straight into professional work, rather than the usual route of school and youth productions.

“My dad often says that he admired my headstrong beginnings,” says the New Jersey native and high school dropout (he eventually did earn an equivalency diploma, and pursued some college studies at Fordham and Columbia).

“I don’t think of it that way — I don’t recall it being that way. But I started at the Public (Theater) when I was 14. I don’t know if I would go into it now, with a family. But at 14, you’re not thinking. It’s not so much bravery as indifference to danger. You don’t know it exists.

“(So) I didn’t have the ‘Glee’ childhood. Probably luckily. I don’t have many regrets about school. I had a better time with Swoosie Kurtz and George Grizzard (his co-stars in the 1985 off-Broadway play ‘The Beach House’) than I would’ve at my prom.”

The Public in New York happens to be the theater that Globe artistic chief Edelstein was helping lead when the Globe hired him last fall. But it’s not where he and Leonard met; in fact, Leonard isn’t quite sure where they first crossed paths.

“I could tell you more about girls he kissed in bars over the past 30 years than I could tell you about the Public Theater (connection),” Leonard says. “We’d see each other after (shows), in bars, when we were young. When we were idiots.” (For the record: Edelstein is long since married, with kids of his own.)

Also, Leonard notes, Edelstein “directed Uma (Thurman), one of my best friends’ wives, in a Molière play a long time ago.”

The play was “The Misanthrope” (in 1999), and the best friend was (and is) Ethan Hawke, whom Leonard has known since their “Dead Poets” days.

Leonard thinks back on those early, madly passionate years of their careers with fondness but not a yearning to return.

“Between the ages of 14 and 24, it doesn’t feel like work, because you’re so full of yourself,” he says. “You are the center of the universe, and you meet Ethan Hawke at 2 in the morning at the White Horse Tavern to discuss ‘Romeo and Juliet’ because it feels that important.

“Whereas now it’d be, ‘Are you out of your (bleeding) mind? Who cares whether you play Mercutio or I play Mercutio?’ ”

Leonard sounds especially turned off by the idea of a full-time television career: “Making TV is really horrible,” as he puts it, citing primarily the difficult hours for a family man. Still, he says he loved “House” star Hugh Laurie and the rest of the show’s team, and he’s quick to acknowledge that “House” has given him welcome financial freedom. (He’s also unabashedly excited about his upcoming guest gig on the sci-fi series “Falling Skies,” alongside his old pal Noah Wyle.)

“I’ve been really spoiled,” he says. “I’m a spoiled little Chihuahua. I’ve been doing what I want for my whole career, and being paid pretty well for it.”

And while he has a demanding role in “Pygmalion,” Leonard also insists that “I don’t find stage work hard.” Even if he finds it hard to picture what it’s like for audiences to watch him in a role like Henry.

“I can’t imagine seeing me in it,” as he puts it. “But luckily, I never have to.”